One of the things I keep thinking of is how if I were to deny the reduction, in a way that, too, would be a transcendental condition on the history of science, which I want to deny(EDIT: i want to deny transcendental conditions of history). So I also don't want to come hard against it the reduction, but more highlight where there are problems and difficulties.

At the end, I think what convinces me that it's not possible is just the sheer diversity of the sciences today. There's so much, and so much of it has been successful without bothering with physics, that I begin to wonder what's the point of bridge laws anyways?

If your point is that Darwin didn't start with Newtonian laws and work his way up to evolution, I don't think that's what reductionists are suggesting scientists should do. Are they? — frank

Oh no, I don't think they'd make that simple of a mistake. So not the latter. I haven't read Schrodinger's book, so I cannot comment on that work, only to say that even if we perform this reduction, the practice of science, rather than the concepts of science, are what make it what it is This distinction between concept and practice is mostly what I was trying to get at -- the reduction occurs between concepts, but science is defined by what scientists do rather than the conceptual content of their theories. At least with respect to how I generally come to understand science in my method (where history trumps conception, though there is an interplay there too)

What's your assessment of the book?

But as a theory, I think evolution is amenable to reduction to physics. Darwin just didn't live long enough to read Schrodinger's book on it. I don't think he would have objected.
...
Any reasons why? — frank

More in the realm of "difficulties" than full on reasons -- but then noticed your opening point fit closer to your question here.

The thing I'd bring up is that "species" doesn't have a physics analogue. And, at present, though we are still building a mechanical theory of life, there's no reason to believe that said mechanical theory of life will reduce to physics, since biochemistry still utilizes chemical terms (like identifying molecules by structure, mass, temperature, etc.). And descriptions of life frequently utilize teleological notions, which is something else you'd have to figure out how to reduce or explain away (something like "what they really mean is..." rules) Even with our metabolic pathway mapped out molecularly, you won't find a behavior in that map that puts the food into the mouth to get the metabolic pathway going. Animal behavior, psychology, frequently utilizes notions which at least are not clearly reducible to physics... you see a pattern. :D

I guess it would be looking at, what constitutes a bridge law? What counts as a reduction to physics?

Could you explain what's meant by "transcendentalism"? — frank

There's a habit of thought where we come to see things with respect to that thought a lot. So with Popper you have this account which supposedly solves the problem of induction as well as the problem of demarcation, and lays out a rationality that scientists should follow in their theorizing.

It's all very interesting, only it doesn't look much like what scientists actually do.

Yet, we can double down and say, where scientists are not following a purported rationality, that is where they are being irrational and unscientific.

That's the move I think I'd guard against. I think it better to let history trump our ratio-centric re-statements of what we believe might be going on, in accord with a certain rationality we choose (because how else would you judge it rationally than be first choosing your rationality?)

For some reason or other, this way of doing things seems to produce sentences which are applicable to more than one -- and in fact many -- circumstances. But that "for some reason", so I believe, is not a conceptual boundary. So I think to answer your question here:

So let me ask: do you think biology can't be reduced (in the Nagelian sense) to physics? Or are you just saying it hasn't been as of yet? — frank

I was thinking how given that Darwin's proposal, in his own time, did not reduce to physics, yet it was science, and we continue to believe it and count it as science (though the story gets more complicated along the way), then that shows how science does not always reduce to physics.

Maybe in some sense in the future it could, but just having a moment is enough to show how scientific practice, in particular, does not reduce to physics.

But, more straightforward for what I believe: I don't really believe it could be reduced, though I'm not firm on that notion. But that's where I stand.

Some distinct theories that we still hold that don't reduce to one another though they do receive support from one another, which is one reason why we look for this more general structure of science:

Mechanics (all kinds)
Molecular theory and its relationship to the atom. (in particular I think the notion of molecular structure, rather than just the structure of things smaller than atoms, is something which chemists use that isn't exactly physics)
Evolutionary theory of speciation
Anthropogenically caused global warming (chemistry gives this a lot of support, in my view, but it was climate scientists doing climate science)
The germ theory of disease (and medical science, generally, I think walks its own way while simultaneously using other sciences in its own practices)
The theory of Plate tectonics

At least, these are the sorts of theories that I think of as distinct, and non-reductive with respect to one another.

But that's just the big-picture theory of science where we really believe it constructs some kind of unified picture. As soon as we let go of that, reductionism really is everywhere in scientific practice. It's just not so straightforward as a reduction to physics.

Heh, well I'd say pretty good, considering you're on the losing side of the debate :D -- but that's clearly just what I think, too, so hey, it's always good to stretch no matter the side we find ourselves on. I'm still interested. "Anything goes" isn't exactly satisfying either, in the end, even if it guards against a certain kind of transcendentalism that is worse than not having a theory.

I believe "reductionism" can definitely be made richer than your opening does. If you could make the case that individual sciences utilize reductionism, and that said utilization is the most rational way of doing science, then that'd undercut my second point since I was arguing against the notion that science reduces specifically to physics, which I think is just an easily disproven belief. All you need do is point out the theory of evolution, which is clearly a novel scientific theory which didn't reduce life to physics. But if reductionism isn't just the restatement of scientific theories in the terms of physics, my second argument, at least, would then be irrelevant. (EDIT: And, to be clear, my first paragraph points out how my answer, while rationally defensible, is at least unsatisfying, so there's still room for conversation)

Just to be clear, no sarcasm on my part. The ideas are thick enough, no need to add more complexity :D

The second meaning of reductionism is the assertion that all sciences should reduce to physics (just as Apollo did). The argument for this hinges mainly on the success of physics up to this point. At least methodologically, scientists should continue to stick to what's been working for thousands of years. We should approach all topics available for scientific inquiry as if the goal is further reduction to physics.

Thoughts? — frank

I'd argue against this form of reductionism.

Scientists haven't stuck to any methodological consideration for thousands of years. What works is dependent upon a community of scientists. And sometimes reductionism is a method which works to resolve problems, and sometimes it doesn't. It's this view of science being that Feyerabend targets when he says "anything goes" -- if science is an immutable, transcendental method of knowledge generation, and the method to understanding said method is to be gleaned by understanding what scientists actually do, and we look to the historical evidence of science the only theory one can propose that unites all historical scientific activity is to say "anything goes" -- whatever the scientists do in a current era, that's what the science is. Else, you'll find counter-examples of a proposed transcendental methodology.

Even removing the historical scope wouldn't work to make way for the claim that scientists reduce to physics: chemistry nor biology concern themselves with reducing to physics, and yet both will utilize physics for their own purposes and both utilize mathematical expressions in their own domains. (of course, this would depend upon which chemist and biologist -- organic synthesis in chemistry, for instance, is more concerned with synthesizing novel molecules, which follow their own set of rules which ahve been documented from experiments, and the only area of biology I can think of where physics would commonly interact would be bio-chemistry, such as the description of proton pumps which utilize quantum tunneling).

Roughly, the diversity of sciences outside of physics (where their methods are certainly more than reducing to physics) argues against the claim that scientists should reduce things to physics. Rather, science, as a whole, is a multiplicity of methods and approaches and foci. It's a social practice rather than a methodology.

fyi, if you are following along with the marxists dot org website version, Tuesday's reading gets us up to everything before this point: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm

For theodicy?

Not in my opinion. If karma plays the same role as heaven/hell, then it serves the same purpose as papering over inconvenient philosophical thoughts, I think.

The strong response, at least from my perspective (and I believe I've made this argument before), is to accept faith.

Or, to dress it up philosophically, the teleological suspension of the ethical.

One thing I'm wondering about -- I'm interested to see how Harvey begins to bring out the structure of the Grundrisse, because he mentioned that in the first lecture of his. And so far it just seems like a grab bag of topics that are loosely connected.

The chapter on money -- begins with criticizing the belief that owned metal and monetary value are in any way related. And while fights with Proudhoun are more just for historical interest, the following reflects upon Marx's method:

Economic facts do not furnish them with the test of their theories; rather, they furnish the proof of their lack of mastery of the facts, in order to be able to play with them. Their manner of playing with the facts shows, rather, the genesis of their theoretical abstractions.

Marx against clouds onin the sky revolutionary thinking:

But no, says the Proudhonist. Our new organization of the banks would not be satisfied with the negative accomplishment of abolishing the metal basis and leaving everything else the way it was. It would also create entirely new conditions of production and circulation, and hence its intervention would take place under entirely new preconditions. Did not the introduction of our present banks, in its day, revolutionize the conditions of production? Would large-scale modern industry have become possible without this new financial institution, without the concentration of credit which it created, without the state revenues which it created in antithesis to ground rent, without finance in antithesis to landed property, without the moneyed interest in antithesis to the landed interest; without these things could there have been stock companies etc., and the thousand forms of circulating paper which are as much the preconditions as the product of modern commerce and modern industry?

Personally I'm enjoying the discussion on money's value, but I can see it as being pretty dry too. A gem in the discussion, though, to disabuse certain misinterpretations of the labor theory of value:

What determines value is not the amount of labour time incorporated in products, but rather the amount of labour time necessary at a given moment.

There's a lot more where Marx talks about the value of money in relation to other theories of value, in particular he criticizes the use of time-chits as a replacement for money, noting that the time-chits would basically function exactly as money does now, where it'd have a relationship to price such that 3 hours time-chit= 1 hour labor time, due to market fluctuations -- a common distinction Marx makes is between price and value, or exchange value and real value. If you think of the little charts they put up to represent a Market, the average between the fluctuations is here being posited as the value and the number on the graph is the price. I'm not sure if this was my understanding of Capital's distinction... I would have said that the two are entirely separate, or in contradiction, which is what Marx says here but he's also intimating that the market price more or less "tracks" value (if we wanted to dispute, say, the use of the average function, but wanted to posit another one, some kind of aggregate function EDIT: Like median or mode, for instance, but I'm sure we could come up with more)

...

Also, I am not following this line:

Value is at the same time the exponent of the relation in which the commodity is exchanged with other commodities, as well as the exponent of the relation in which it has already been exchanged with other commodities (materialized labour time) in production;

I'm not sure what the exponent of a relation is, for Marx. (or, really, in general...)

But, I like this paragraph which gets closer to what I understand of Marx's theory of value:

Two commodities, e.g. a yard of cotton and a measure of oil, considered as cotton and as oil, are different by nature, have different properties, are measured by different measures, are incommensurable. Considered as values, all commodities are qualitatively equal and differ only quantitatively, hence can be measured against each other and substituted for one another (are mutually exchangeable, mutually convertible) in certain quantitative relations. Value is their social relation, their economic quality. A book which possesses a certain value and a loaf of bread possessing the same value are exchanged for one another, are the same value but in a different material. As a value, a commodity is an equivalent for all other commodities in a given relation. As a value, the commodity is an equivalent; as an equivalent, all its natural properties are extinguished; it no longer takes up a special, qualitative relationship towards the other commodities; but is rather the general measure as well as the general representative, the general medium of exchange of all other commodities. As value, it is money.

More or less pointing out that any commodity can serve as a repository of value, and hence be currency. (but there are material reasons you'd pick one commodity over another).

All this talk about how money works to arrive at the conclusion:

Now, just as it is impossible to suspend the complications and contradictions which arise from the existence of money alongside the particular commodities merely by altering the form of money (although difficulties characteristic of a lower form of money may be avoided by moving to a higher form), so also is it impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products. It is necessary to see this clearly in order to avoid setting impossible tasks, and in order to know the limits within which monetary reforms and transformations of circulation are able to give a new shape to the relations of production and to the social relations which rest on the latter.

Super interesting paragraph distinguishing social existence of value from natural existence:

The product becomes a commodity; the commodity becomes exchange value; the exchange value of the commodity is its immanent money-property; this, its money-property, separates itself from it in the form of money, and achieves a general social existence separated from all particular commodities and their natural mode of existence; the relation of the product to itself as exchange value becomes its relation to money, existing alongside it; or, becomes the relation of all products to money, external to them all. Just as the real exchange of products creates their exchange value, so does their exchange value create money.

Got up to the break on page 153, or at the top of https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm today ~80 pages to go before Tuesday, laundry day should cover it.

No Exit. — Banno

Yeh, tho is hell other people really?

It's a temptation to say for me, but... naw, not really.

So you adopt the attitude of Homo Economicus? Yes, that's what games theory says we should do. But few of us actually act in this way. Offers of less then 20% are routinely rejected, despite being a win-win. — Banno

Only in matters of money. Though I acknowledge that it was a training, and not a natural inclination. But I'll note that even in adopting that attitude I was attempting to say I agree that I'd tell the other guy to eat it, just to be clear. My thought was if I have what is being offered I'm in a position that I don't have to say yes. So, in fact, I have a good bargaining position compared to the other guy. The other guy can only make an offer, I'm the one who gets to say yes or no. That means the outcome depends upon my wishes, and not theirs.

It's a trained way of thinking, I'll admit.

What I'm interested in is that the game shows that we intuitively reject the correct games-theoretical response, which is to accept any offer. Compare that with the recent discussions here of Moore's arguments that we intuit the good. — Banno

We're on the same page with the first sentence, then. I agree that's interesting, even with upping the ante.

I only feel comfortable saying maybe on the second sentence?

Is our intuition of the good the manifestation of an evolved strategy? Is what feels fair is a result of natural selection towards an appropriate stochastic games theoretical strategy? — Banno

I tend to believe that the social environment is where we can find causal explanations for what we feel in regards to ethical intuition.

So, in a very broad sense of natural selection, I would say yes -- but I'd hasten to add that this is an application of the notion (because nothing has been specified) of natural selection in a new domain, namely, culturally -- perhaps even anthropologically.

And if it is, does that matter? — Banno

Heh, well, I'd say it doesn't in an ethical sense. We are, for better or worse, condemned to be free. I think Sartre got that right.

But as soon as we care about ethics, then it clearly matters because you have to know where you are to get to where you want to be.

In the introduction there's a number of times Marx really "shows his ass" -- and this is where my heterodoxy comes into play -- where he truly believes there are higher and lower forms of civilizational development, in the same vein as the positivists like Comte, but instead with a proposed socialism which could develop out of capitalism as an even higher form of economic development.

Given the influence historiography, and even tangentially anthropology, has had on my thinking I cannot agree with Marx on stages of history, or even a material teleology. However, with historiography I've learned there's always a theory of history which makes the writing of history possible -- there is no "way things were" in a scientific sense. (which is another point of contention I have with the orthodox view, though not so strongly as the above).

But to give an end quote to show what I'm saying:

In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns or also Shakespeare. It is even recognized that certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be produced in their world epoch-making, classical stature as soon as the production of art, as such, begins; that is, that certain significant forms within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development. If this is the case with the relation between different kinds of art within the realm of the arts, it is already less puzzling that it is the case in the relation of the entire realm to the general development of society. The difficulty consists only in the general formulation of these contradictions. As soon as they have been specified, they are already clarified.

Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Crédit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.

From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?

But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.

There is an interpretation in there that minimizes the cultural chauvinism, but I'd say this is one of the things I find most unattractive in Marx -- he, too, was a product of his time, and chauvinism is a part of his writing.

I am mainly concerned with the question of whether someone's descendant can inherit guilt. It is a common theme in religion with the original sin and in the Notion of Karma.

I was bought up being told that I was inherently sinful and deserving of hell. And there is the doctrine of total depravity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_depravity

But it doesn't necessarily make sense.

But some times the continued presence of malicious human behaviour through history can make you support a notion of original sin. Are we born with innate antisocial traits? — Andrew4Handel

I think I'd like to split up these questions into three:

1) Can a person inherit family guilt, or be subject to some kind of original sin outside of their control?
2) Is that the same as original sin and being born to deserve damnation?
3) Are we born with innate antisocial traits?


To 1 I'd want to say yes. 2, no. 3, no, with a but.

1) Mostly thinking, what's stopping you from inheriting family guilt? It seems like a truism that if one lives within a culture where such a thing is enforced that that person has to deal with the consequences of that family guilt, whether they like it or not. (Now, should they? That's a different question)

2) For me a sort of boring no, because I simply don't believe in the premises that even give these words meaning.

3) No, we're not. And it's worth noting that "antisocial" is dependent upon which social environment we're in, so in a boring way we cannot be born with antisocial traits, even if we have inherent traits, because it's not dependent upon the traits it's dependent upon the evaluation of those traits in a given social environment.

The "but" -- we all have this potential, so I believe, to be persuaded to do evil. "Evil" is a funny word for materialism, but what I'd highlight is that we are all frail, prone to make mistakes, and so on, and the evils of the world were done by ordinary people like ourselves.

Finished up the introduction reading today, and I like this quote from Marx on methodology because it relates to a number of debates we have on the forum with respect to realism:

It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being. For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole. As a category, by contrast, exchange value leads an antediluvian existence. Therefore, to the kind of consciousness – and this is characteristic of the philosophical consciousness – for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production – which only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from the outside – whose product is the world; and – but this is again a tautology – this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts. The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.

Definitely a "Hegel on its head" move, where the categories are real both concretely and within one's own head. (EDIT: or as I've said before, Marx gets to cheat on the problem of consciousness, but the solution might be judged worse than the problem)


My aim is to have a writeup for the next reading to post before the class this time, so as to exercise the mind more.

An anecdote of the phenomena: I remember a contract negotiation where part of the bargaining unit cared more about the difference in pay between themselves and another group than what they would earn overall. I don't remember the numbers, but while the new pay schedule gave them a larger raise, they were more concerned with the pecking order than the raise they got.

"Which Rationality?" indeed.

Bingo!

In a regulative sense I think it makes sense to talk of the real meaning -- at least somewhat historically grounded, roughly responding to this or that idea -- but then as you try to find the real meaning, so as to say "yes, this is it, for these reasons", especially with the usual philosophical texts which attract us: it is fairly judged as a multiplicity.

Now, up the ante to something on the range of a years worth salary equaling 10 percent of what you can give, I bet you'd see different outcomes.

Hey, if a guy has the power to give me something fair, I have a buck in my pocket. I don't need to benefit him.

I think that's pretty much it. "Oh, I see what I'm worth to you. Guess what I can do..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is_uAYFpsZU&ab_channel=ThePeople%27sForumNYC

Hopefully that one works.

Some notes while listening, very rough but willing to share:

I stand corrected in the first lecture, as Harvey tells us he is not a philosopher in the first few sentences :D. Oh well. I am inclined to call anyone a philosopher who can interpret Marx.

Super happy with Harvey's mention of "moments", and the circulatory analogy.

Interesting his inner/outer distinction -- because it highlights how the "outer" is itself something which comes under control, or is coming under control, as capital develops. And I like how Harvey highlights the totality in order to focus what Marx is talking about, the mode of production of capital, as well as because he uses "metabolism" as a distinction between the environment and the mode of production.

But as "moments"! Very cool. I like his highlight that it depends on where you're at in the text.

Neat that Harvey mentioned the M-C-M of capital, but he's breaking it down with his notion of "every conversion from commodity to money", but then highlighting "totality" where each part is interdependent upon the other parts to make a process work, not a thing. He even mentions "flow" which made me happy, thinking about the Deleuze-Marx crossover.

Hah! I love his story about 9/11, and how people got worried about the flow of capital. I basically attribute the whole "back to normal" thing with Covid-19 to be the same thing.

Then 2008 mentioned, which makes me happy too. First time I read Capital V1 was in the wake of 2008 and it made me start to take Marx seriously rather than just as an interest.

Also glad he mentioned climate change in relation to Marx, especially with his notion of the "spiral structure" of capital. There's an entity you can relate to problems!

I'm glad he's relating modern political problems to the theories of Marx, and in a way that's actually quite easy to digest. With a live Q&A from the audience no less! That's brave to put on a live stream. (also, they said they'll have the video recorded to share on youtube later)

Hrrmm! Good question about why the Grundrisse! And what a great answer! I've asked that question myself, and hot-damn, a great answer that motivates me to get on to Capital V 2

Interesting quote from Harvey is that Capital is written specifically for autodidacts, educated workers. Guess that's why I glommed onto it! As a young one I thought Engels was funny to say Capital v 1 was the bible of the working class, but apparently...

Ahhh.... I didn't realize that Harvey was a geographer first. Eggs and faces.

Happy that on lecture 1 he mentions how Marx is committed to freedom. (and even mentions a take about marxism/anarchy). "free time is what the mark of a what a socialist society should be about"

Oh, no. So many mentions of Robinson Crusoe. I'm so seen! Just cribbing on Marx... ;)

"there are certain categories that apply to economy no matter the mode of production"
"i want to know the categories that specifically apply to a capitalist mode of production"
-- love this mention of categories between the general theory and the theory of capital, because I remember capital v 1 starts with the most general categories which is very confusing when you are reading capital v 1 to learn about, say, capital. But he's always talking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. So he has to make a third, general relation that relates the change

hah! I snuck in some reading and was happy to hear the same highlight I made on p87 of Penguin as they said. The one where he's annoyed with Mill, and relating that to modern politcal struggles! ala Bernie/Sanders etc. that are popular and somewhat on the side of Mill. Glad to see this distinction being made. With the labor theory of value being mentioned no less! vs. the "problem of scarcity".

Mmmm. I'm so happy to hear him hitting "moments" so often, because one of the reasons I have not written Hegel off is because I thought Hegel's logic is really central to Marxist thinking. And "moments", as I recall, were the monadic bits that formed the familiar the triadic structure from Hegel (then, having a name for that traidic structure, it can then form another moment from its negation...). Basically I'm glad that he's not doing the kind of reading which wants to minimize Hegel, because my honest reading of Marx is ... that they are too close to do that.

I love the page 100 close Harvey quoted, supporting my interpretation of Marx that the social is an organism: "This is the case with every organic whole" (for David harvey, "whole" is "totality")

"you learn Marx's method by watching him work" -- that's interesting because the only time I feel like I can kind of follow Hegel is in his Phenomonology of Spirit

"he is very nervous about chaotic conception" -- until you start to break it down into all the classes and all these things and as you start to break it down you stop needing population.

"...but this time not as a chaotic conception, but this time as a totality" -- starting to come back up from all the concepts you have established. it's a method of descent then a method of ascent...and the method of ascent is the real scientific method.

ahhhhh! "that is what the grundrisse is trying to do is to conceptually grasp..." very excited to hear "grasp", tho not related to this but more Levinas in relation to Marx

****

Hah! I love his honest comments about how he's not interested at all about Proudhon and Marx. Also I'm OK with having only read a few pages of the introduction, but now I'm seeing he's going to assume having read beforehand. Happy that he's up front about the kind of interpretation he's interested in, and I'm glad to hear that it's from the perspective of one of the main influences of Marx's theories! Never thought I'd get the opportunity to hear an interpretation of a text from a living Ricardian! One who is also critical of Marx. So, so good. I was nudged, and it's distracting me from reading Levinas, but... I think I'm hooked. (will post later when I figure out where they are putting the recordings)

Deleuze came to mind because of your mention of code, and his notion of code is the first thing I thought of.

Given that colors are "in themselves" without meaning, how is it that colors come to have this quality of meaning which is in-between a natural, necessary law and the subjective musings of an individual?

Or, so I was thinking: How do colors have meanings? Answer -- desire. But not desire as a lack, and so not a problem in need of a solution, or a disease in need of a cure, but rather unbounded desire that, again so I thought, schizo-analysis might give an answer to.

"Green", for instance, has the meaning of nature and the earth, I'd say. I wasn't sure how your orange was working so I was trying to break out a kind of logical syntax of code for clear communication (though I'd hasten to add that a given syntax is, itself, a kind of code -- so you get overcoding, codes upon coded desire) -- so where I saw where you were going with green I wasn't sure where you were going with orange, hence my positing the general "::" for which you could substitute really any linguistic relationship (and so not necessarily big-R, set-bound "Relations")

"it" as in color code?

So,

Blue:self:Good
Red:enemy:Bad
Green:world:indifferent

if you look at modernity/ capitalism as based on rational idealism, Descartes's rationalization of all thought and where that went, Calvinistic ethics producing a capitalistic culture contrasted with Marx's dialectical materialism that was not rational idealism, but that the spirit is from the corporeal like the green color code. — introbert

Cool. Thanks for the opportunity to think about Deleuze. It's a rare treat.

I'm going to try to pick apart this sentence in the manner I started.


if you look at modernity/ capitalism as based on rational idealism, Descartes's rationalization of all thought and where that went, Calvinistic ethics producing a capitalistic culture

contrasted with

Marx's dialectical materialism that was not rational idealism, but that the spirit is from the corporeal like the green color code.

So a possible rendition of the above code:

.
.
.
Idealism::Materialism
Orange::Green
Descartes::Marx
Rationalism::Dialectic
Capitalist::Dialectical Materialism
Spirit::corporeal
.
.
.

But this is in categorical terms, and explicitly dyadic. I'd say that this dyadic description of the flow glosses over some of the relationships which you describe, such as the relationship between the steps of the flow of codes like Calvinism (the protestant work ethic) linking up to capitalism on the left hand side.


How does that sound so far?

I'd say that your proposal would count as a dyad within the series of code.

.
.
.
libido::will-to-power
conformist::schizo

Or, an alternate code

libido::will-to-power
schizo::conformist
.
.
.

Or, since Marx is in the mix, we could even say these are two step codes within another two-step Code such that a circle could be formed between the two -- so a four step loop, in the notion of a code where a dyad is executed.

In a flow of desire within the Body without Organs one can see, in the place of the general "::", one could set up a series of relationships (such as "Reacts to yield", if one wanted a molecular-level description of the flows of desire) which demonstrate how one named entity leads to another named entity in a flow of desire. There is no person there, there is only the flow which resists the socius, is the very anti-thesis of the socius. Where the Body without Organs is an RNA being produced along a DNA strand, or a protein being produced along some RNA, the flow has no super-order, no telos, no function. The socius would say here is a heart whose function, something which eventually builds a psyche that can then finally be analyzed, but the Body without Organs is just this flow without identity.

***
Stepping back...

My take, at least, is that Deleuze is trying to expound a more general theory of desire which could account for libido or value, two sides of rational analysis which in his world were Freud and Marx, but rather than having it based upon a theory of desire where desire is a lack, it was meant to be a productive theory of desire. On top of that it's meant to be very general, in a sort of theory of everything way, so the political events of 1968 are also at least a creative point of inspiration.

And it makes sense when you think of the psychologist as the one who normalizes people to get back to work. The Freudian analysis will reveal and heal the anxiety within us so we can be productive and society can remain stable.

In that vein, I'm sort of just trying the ideas out rather than claiming true textual fidelity. But I thought the ideas could make sense of your notion of a color code!

I think the Body without Organs is one pole in the description of productive desire, where the Socius is the other pole. I agree that the individual body is itself a series of flows of desire -- my copy has the same image you describe.

The part I could never figure out in there was the third part -- but I thought that might be on purpose because it is, after all, anti-oedipus, and so it'd make sense to try to break the triad he highlights of Daddy-Mommy-Me.

Well, that's not for me personally. But I'm OK with being the guy who measures how far the pup went. It is an exciting sport, after all, that brings people together.

Got my account up and running at Action Network, and spotted the reading schedule as I was getting prepped for tomorrow. I haven't read yet, I was going to wait until after class to see what sort of format to expect from the class before taking notes and such. (also, I didn't get the companion, I'm just going to follow along with the Grundrisse)

Looking forward to it!

Theodicy in the abstract, perhaps, but I've no doubt that a theodicy complete with ethical calculation could be devised if proximity is the only difference. Something akin to the conservation laws which are clearly not falsifiable as they are stated.

Heh, causation isn't central to doing physics, sure, but in a funny way in which nothing is central :D -- it's just a concept people say they like. I'm not sure to what extent the concept plays a role, though...

One of the differences might be that scientists are willing to entertain a physics without causation. I'm not sure that the theodicist is commonly willing to entertain an evil without a corresponding good. It is more an article of faith, as you say, than a bit that seems to hold but ultimately can be seen as a tool more than a truth.

True. To be insane in this culture is to be excommunicated not from a personal religion, but from the civic religion -- one is considered unfit for some public function or other.

There's definitely many more steps. I think of code like a bike-chain, or a string of DNA/RNA, but more abstract -- which is why you can have desiring-machines like the mouth-to-nipple desiring-machine. Abstractly there's the connection between any named entities which compose the flows of desire, be they coded, decoded, or over-coded.

The desiring-machines are composed of partial machines and flows. I imagine the concatenation of desiring-machines as the steps in a code.

Before coding you have the the formation of elements, the cooling of the elements into planets, a moon which swishes the water to ensure the beaker remains mixed -- be it by chance or God (and aren't they really the same?), the desire for self-reproduction, the simplest of desiring-machines, begins to flourish.

The ocean prior to bits of self-replicating RNA, as we guess now but who knows, is what I think of when I think of the Body without Organs -- the plenum of possibility, the complete deflation of all structures or struggles, the medium in which organs are formed out of desiring-machines.

I'm not against good sense, either, nor do I think you are. I just don't think that desire works in accord with good sense. "Good sense" is one of the names by which we can identify a flow of desire!

I've reached a dead end, what went wrong? Why did it not sustain? For both me and anyone else who knew them, it was ideal. — RBS

I'd say that this is the nature of human relationship. Commitment, what was, ideals -- the stuff of conversation, but not the stuff of a relationship.

Which isn't to say that a relationship will always dissipate. But only that all relationships are always vulnerable to dissipation. What makes a relationship work over time are the participants, and as they change or find things out about one another sometimes we make mistakes, we break our relationships, or we become fascinated by something aside from the relationship, or we take the relationship for granted (oh, that will always be there), or we simply drift apart for no dramatic reason whatsoever but simply because life is busy between work, children, friends, and commitments. (hence why you hear people talk of "finding that spark again")

Interesting tactic! I hadn't read, but having given that article a quick look-over--

To contrast the theodicy with "Every event has a cause"

For all evil there exists a good which explains the evil
For all events there exists a cause which explains the event

The latter is often proposed as a rational regulative principle. Some people even believe it's true!

Under that, it would seem the rational conditions of the former would be as you say -- an acknowledged regulative principle that one believes is true, but isn't exactly demonstrable. So maybe rational to believe, but not rational to argue for.

I can say I've read him, but that has more to do with my eclectic way of gathering anything I can find that's related to what I'm thinking through (in this case the starting thread was deontology and Kant, IIRC)

My memory was I didn't really like it -- you mentioning moral certitude rings true to memory, but what we are respectively certain about made it hard to like.

If there is such a point where it's more rational to reject the greater good theodicy than it is to accept it, can the theodicist be convinced by the heinous amounts of suffering in the world that the threshold is met? — Astro Cat

I don't think the theodicist can be convinced, no. I'm not sure under what circumstances I'd say it's even a rational argument -- I agree with you that it's special pleading.

If God's thoughts are beyond our thoughts, then "suffering" is already too human, too meaningful to count. So God would certainly not have a reason which is a greater good -- that's a very human way of looking at the world, and his thoughts are beyond ours, so these are not his thoughts. These are our thoughts: and a thoughtless no-thought at the end of a question is the most human position: most of our beliefs we don't bother justifying, after all. We just believe them while they work. And the theodicy, to my mind, is just a way to paper over where the belief won't work -- a time when the belief is really of low consequence (in a philosophical argument) so the paper argument works for some.

Hrrmm... isn't it also the case, though, that there's been a lot of crossover between these two disciplines?

I always find the two disciplines fascinating in blend -- in fact that's what I was thinking with respect to philosophy of science as to why it gets less attention: you need to know not just one discipline, but two -- and, in practice, a lot of philosophy of science relies upon a philosophy of history, so you get to have that thrown into the mix as well.

So it's just a larger barrier to entry than a lot of the other sub-fields of philosophy the standard topics one encounters that turns one onto philosophy. Not that there aren't people who really can pick up on all of these things at once, just that it's less likely to find a person who does simply by the number of things you need to feel confident about to do it.

. The color code for orange is a little different, still complex but not about concept::material analogy that connects the color green to code. Orange is from a similar sounding location in France that has no material analogy to the concept. — introbert

This grabbed my attention -- as a means for understanding "code" one could say

x::y

However, I want to say that this is only a step in a code. So where you have

Concept::material

I might add

Materialist::green

As a prior step. In a way the concept::material is in the process of decoding the flow by abstraction.


The coding of flows of desire is one of the analogies that really stuck with me from Anti-Oedipus. I can't claim to say I understand Deleuze, but it's a concept I often find myself returning to (even if I don't understand it! :D)

Right! (And aren't these speeches, in fact, somewhat magical? Pronounced man and wife, and with a kiss, a social bond is started)

I think there's something to this -- there is this move that exists whereby a person is rendered no longer able. It's not that such cases of helplessness don't exist, it's more that they are attributed to delegitimatize and disable rather than identify in order to enable (and, frequently, there's nothing to identify -- the delegitimization is the point). Where once we had a person, now we have baptized them into a schizophrenic: trust the doctor's word over your own feelings.

Hell, my first talk therapist was like that. Annoying as all get out.

But my second one was good. And it was nothing like this. It was an actual relationship between us through which we'd talk through emotions. Much more my way of doing things: shared responsibility, patient-directed, that sort of thing.

But the sort of measurements that count in the second version are things like self-report: rather than silencing a person into a patient, it's an approach which retains autonomy of the person who needs some help (rather than a patient who needs a cure, no matter what they say)

Am I right to say that you believe "anomie" is a word which turns a person from a critical observer to a person who needs a cure?